tending
great zeal in seeking a knowledge of the Hindu religion, he succeeded
in gaining the confidence of the priests in charge, and though the
temple with its lofty towers, gilded cupola, pagoda, seven enclosures,
and Brahman dwellings, was jealously guarded, and surrounded by a wall
four miles in circumference, he secured one of the stones, and,
eluding the vigilant guardians of the temple, fled with it to Madras.
The other eye he could not force from the socket. Arrived there, he is
said to have sold it for £2,000 to a captain in the British navy (some
say an English sea captain), who carried it to London and sold it to a
Jewish merchant for £12,000. This is said to have occurred at the
commencement of the eighteenth century. Nothing more is recorded of
this diamond, but in the latter part of the century, a similar stone
was sold to Count Orloff for the Empress Catherine of Russia for
1,400,000 Dutch gulden, or about $560,000. Bauer gives the date of the
sale as 1791, and in common with other writers assumes it to be the
same stone. Streeter gives the following from Boyle in Museum
Britanicum (London, 1791), who quotes from a letter from the Hague
under date of January 2, 1776. " We learn from Amsterdam that Prince
Orlow made but one day stay in that city, where be bought a very large
brilliant for the Empress, his sovereign, for which he paid to a
Persian merchant there, the sum of 1,400,000 florins Dutch money." As
Orloff was Catherine's lover at the time she became Empress in 1762,
and Potemkin, who became her favorite in 1765, did not lose a
controlling influence over her until he died in 1791, it is possible
that the purchase of what is known as the Orloff diamond occurred in
1775,
